(AN: HI EVERYONE! I'm back and I'm here with more long-winded fanfiction about dog demons.

If anyone has read my old fic Otoko no Yurei, some of this will be familiar, but most of it will not. I felt like there was a lot more story to tell than a 13k oneshot could really contain, and so I set out to write down a more cohesive and complete story. This isn't just about the Inu no Taisho... it's also about the history of dog demons, Sessmom, Sesshomaru's childhood, and ultimately will end up hinting at our boy Sesshomaru's destiny post canon (or... the way I'd write it, anyway). A lot of it, including the character Uzume and innumerable other details, were the brain child of my girlfriend -who goes by gobodosama on tumblr- and the conversations we've had about the Dog Family... so a HUGE shoutout to her for inspiring like 99% of this!

There's also gonna be blood, swearing, and some heavily implied sex so I have rated it M but if that doesn't seem right let me know. Here we go!)

Prologue - The Inuyokai's Birth

In the very beginning, dogs were free.

They roamed the forests and countrysides as they saw fit and did not concern themselves with anything besides their own well-being. It was rough and dangerous at times, but it was ultimately a good way to live - they were content among themselves. At some point in history, maybe so far back it could not be recorded, the first human and the first dog met each other and realized that together they could do great things.

Dogs became allies to the human race. There were many rewards; food, shelter, companionship, love, which they repaid with loyalty and hard work. Between the two species there was a kind of easy affection and deep love - humans mourned their lost dogs like they'd lost their own children and siblings and spouses. Dogs would stand vigil over sick humans, and wait for their chance to join them in the netherworld when they died.

But of course, where there is kindness, there is also cruelty.

Humans began to wonder if their companions could do more for them, if they could make them into more powerful servants or tools of their will. It's impossible to say where they got the idea from, just as it's impossible to know how they decided to make fires or create artwork. Perhaps it was divine intervention.

The first person took the first dog and buried him up to his head, his own loyal and loving hunting hound, and left him to starve. When it resulted only in death he got a better idea - why not torture the beast, so that in its fear it would beg for the gods' help? Another dog was taken, this time an old female who had lived the better part of a decade and a half, and she too was buried. Around her, her master laid fresh, juicy cuts of meat and bowls of clear spring water just out of her reach.

She was blinded by panic after three days. After five, she had prayed to every god in heaven and hell to spare her. After seven, she died - sightless and foaming at the mouth, her weary brain filled with confusion and fear. Her master thought that perhaps he had failed again, but when he moved her body to lay it to proper rest, the corpse spoke to him.

"My master," she said in a slow, deep voice. "Do you still have need of me?"

"Yes!" he cried, heart hammering in his chest. "My family will always have need of you!"

"What is my name, master?"

The man tapped his chin, thinking of a suitable name for her, before he smiled a broad grin.

"Uzume," he said, "we will call you Uzume. You are a part of our family now as you always have been, and we will all love you as we did before."

And so the first inugami was made.

o0o

With Uzume's success, many others were made as well - different families got the same idea and all wanted their own godly servants. The wild dogs, who had been friendly and eager before, saw this and became wilder and more feral for fear that they might be captured and put to death, too.

At first, humans used their inugami for simple things like watching children, cooking, and cleaning. But conflict had begun to spring up all around them; farmers quickly turned into soldiers, neighbors into spies, and priests into assassins. All at once it seemed that the inugami's true talents weren't being used to their full advantage. One owner sent his out to kill an old rival who owed him rice as payment, and when the inugami returned with his head between its jaws, the potential of these god-dogs became abundantly clear.

Why risk their own lives when they had perfectly good servants to do the work for them? Suddenly every household seemed to be swarming with them, until inugami almost outnumbered people. They did not die; they were already undead. They did not waver, and they never missed their marks. They were the perfect creation, a blend of nature, man, and the divine.

But all creatures have flaws. An overzealous owner might abuse their power and work their inugami to the breaking point, until they were swelling with pent up rage. These ones were the most merciless of all, not just killing their masters' foes but possessing them, ripping them from the inside out until all that remained was a torn up body, covered in jagged claw marks. Some even had signatures - the more vicious of them adopted a nasty habit of marring their victims' faces so that pieces were carved out of their cheeks and foreheads in deliberate patterns. Some markings became recognizable, and the anonymity of the killer was lost when people could trace the work back to an owner and exact revenge.

One such owner made this very mistake, after years of working her inugami to its limits.

"Why have you marked him?" she cried in despair, taking up a switch from a young sapling into her hand. "The whole family will be after us for revenge!"

"I do as you ask, master," the inugami replied, unflinching even as it endured lash after lash across its muzzle.

"You carved a crescent moon into their foreheads!" she shrieked, increasing the force of her blows. "Our family's crest!"

When the last blow landed, she stilled her hand, watching the dogs eyes for signs of remorse. There was nothing in them - they were hollow and void, sunken, black. She feared for a moment that she had someone managed to kill the unkillable beast, but it spoke to her:

"My family's crest."

There was only a moment of confusion before the dog lunged madly, snapping its powerful jaws and dripping with saliva. Her head was ripped clear from her body in an instant, but the dog-god was unsatisfied with her death alone and soon tracked down the whole household.

Every man, woman, and child was killed, but its anger was unsated. It waited until nightfall for the last of the family to return, knowing that it wouldn't rest until they had all died and its soul could be free from them. Finally, only one person remained; a young woman who was just about marrying age, the youngest daughter in the family. The inugami delighted in her fear, the scent of her sweat and her terror, reminded on a primal level how it had felt to be buried up to the neck and starved to madness. It would not be fitting simply to kill her, but instead take revenge for the cruelty it had endured.

It possessed her bodily, tearing her flesh with her own fingernails and teeth. It dragged grooves into her arms, across her wrists. It attempted to claw her eyes out but missed and dug bleeding, red ribbons across her cheeks. Her soul pleaded with the dog-god, weakened by pain and fear, for one last act of forgiveness and loyalty to her family.

The inugami carved a crescent moon into her forehead - but as the girl's spirit fought, the dog-god could not keep a steady hand and so it only formed a moon shaped bruise instead of a cut. At last, the girl had given up, her soul lost to the netherworld, and the inugami contemplated its next move.

The gods must have heard the girl's plea. As they had done before with the first buried dog's frightened spirit, they'd transformed her body into one that was not quite dead and not quite alive. The inugami tried to leave, but found that it was trapped inside of her. It scrambled about on unsteady human limbs, running out of the house and to a nearby creek to peer over into the reflection.

The girl had been changed into something new. Her face was no longer bleeding, but the red stripes and blue-purple moon remained, despite the inugami's best efforts to wipe it clean. Her eyes, ears, and hair had been touched by a god's hand.

White hair, said a divine voice in the back of the girl's brain, to remind you of your immortality.

Gold eyes, it went on, as the payment your masters gave you and each other for your duties.

Sharpened ears, it finally finished, that you may hear our voices. This is your punishment and your gift.

The inugami wept itself sick by the water's edge, until it had forgotten everything - even its own name.

o0o

It soon became clear that even an inugami created from a well loved family pet could eventually be passed on to a descendent who treated it poorly. Most inugami went mad eventually, killing whole families to release themselves from servitude. Many of them killed every single member of the household and then took their own lives out of grief. But some did not. A small number inhabited the body of the last living member, and marked it with their crest.

People grew afraid of them. They stopped making dog servants out of terror, and the ones who remained were either destroyed or treated with great care and worshipped to prevent madness from striking.

The freed inugami roamed the countryside, wandering aimlessly for nearly a century - until two, taking advantage of their human forms, decided to stay together and have children.

The resulting children were not inugami at all - they were freer, unburdened by a past with humans, like their wild relatives. They had human forms like their parents, but could change with enough force into large, beautiful dogs. They had sound minds and radiated a beautiful, delicious energy from their bodies.

The humans called them inuyokai. They were not gods at all, but demons.

Many of these god and demon families lived together quite happily, but an unseen curve in the creation of an inugami threatened them. Their memories had been taken away in exchange for their freedom, and it was better that way - the torture and bloodshed they had endured would be enough to drive even the strongest spirit to destruction. As long as they could not remember, they were safe. They selected new names for themselves and ignored anything that felt like it might remind them of who they used to be, but all it took was hearing their given names from the lips of another, and they would slip back into endless rage. Unlike the first carnage, the one that had set them free, this one would not end until the inugami itself was killed.

Some foresaw it. When they felt their minds slipping they cloistered themselves away from their families and waited until they ripped themselves to shreds. Others were put down by their own children. Some, the most unlucky, lost everything.

Over time, the old dog-gods were replaced by dog demons. Their societies began to grow and change, mirroring human societies and family clans, together and apart from people all at once. Inugami became scarcer and scarcer - only a few were still being made, and the ones who had not gone mad made a point of staying far, far away from inuyokai. Eventually inugami were like pariahs to their own children and descendants. They had no reason to exist, they had no demonic power, and they could not take their true forms as powerful beasts. They almost died out completely.

Those that remained moved to mountains and lived in caves, or stayed in quiet, secluded sections of the forests. It was an unspoken rule that though they were old and wise, they were dangerous and not to be spoken of or to. The inugami turned into a bedtime story to frighten young pups into behaving.

There were fewer than a dozen left by the era the humans called Heian, and of them was Uzume, the first inugami ever conceived by human hands. She waited alone in the mountains, praying and meditating on her own inevitable descent into darkness and death. For a final time the gods heard her plea for clarity, and kissed her sightless eyes so that she could perceive beyond the physical world and into the future.

And there she would wait for centuries, knowing all and seeing nothing.

(edit as of 10/8/2017: I've got about 4 chapters in total already written for this - with more definitely to come - waiting to be tweaked and edited before I post them... so if you have opinions or suggestions I would love to hear them. I do take those things into consideration when I write, because often times other people can point out little gaps, errors, and weak spots in my writing far better than I can. Thanks for reading!)